germanian_empirefandomcom-20200214-history
Germanian language
The 'Germanian language '(Germønsz sprøcz) is the national language of the Germanian Empire and one of the official languages in several European countries including Austria-Hungary. It belongs to the Anglo-Frisian branch of the West Germanic family. It is a prime example of a conservative language, having retained four cases, full distinction between strong and weak nouns and verbs, and full declension for nouns (albeit with short vowels now replaced in the syllable coda by a schwa). Development Germanian began as Anglo-Saxon, a common language between the Angles, Saxons and Jutes from the 5th century AD. They had previously shared mutually intelligible Germanic dialects, which influenced each other and converged as they traded. Prior to splitting into Old Germanian and Old English by the 12th century, the common Anglo-Saxon language had helped the three Germanic tribes to maintain a pact across what is now England - excluding Cornwall - the south of Scotland, Jutland and northern Germany. In southern Germany, a different West Germanic language known as Thedish (Deutsch), a descendant of Old Saxon, was spoken. The common language broke down from 1066, when England was conquered by France and the subsequent invasion of Jutland by the Norse-speaking Danes, over whose border the Germanians and Danes would fight for centuries. Germania sought to establish greater links with other regions of the Holy Roman Empire. As a result of these interactions, the Thedish language influenced the vocabulary and phonology of the Germanian language; the north's infleunce also meant that Germanian would gradually displace Thedish until it became altogether extinct shortly after Prussia founded the Empire in 1871. However, the southern dialects of Germanian are still remarkable in that they have undergone the second German consonant shift, which had distinguished Thedish from other Germanic languages. As other European languages, Germanian did at one point experience a great level of influence from scholarly Latin and Greek in addition to French. Very little of this is witnessed in Germanian today: most of the loanwords encountered will have been borrowed into Anglo-Saxon and thus fully naturalised. Linguistic purism in Germania first began to take hold particularly between the years of 1760 and 1780 in a movement known as ''Storm and Jedrang ''(Storm and Stress), part of the Romanticism that swept through Europe at the time. It was an artistic movement based on rationalism in which Germanian artists endeavoured to move their audiences emotionally. The artists developed a great awareness of Germania's heritage and proudly used words of Anglo-Saxon origin in their works to discuss new concepts as opposed to Latin ones, which encouraged the public to reject loanwords. The drive to linguistic purism was reinforced by patriotism after winning the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, after which 'folk of Latin origin' were denounced. When the Germanian Empire was proclaimed in January 1871, it was agreed that a strong, 'non-Romantic' language was needed to rally together the now united Germanian people against the enemies. Months later, scholars began to compile the first official Germanian dictionary, prescribing Germanic neologisms for use in the media and teaching in schools. The results were very effective: to this day, a council manages to control the use of the Germanian language and loanwords are barely heard in the Empire, but concessions are made in terms of the great tolerance to the use of dialects, especially in the south.